 In the second video for this week, we are going to talk a little bit more in depth about the actual process of looking up these authority records that we've been talking about. So if you have one of the pieces of information we talked about in the last video, a personal name or a subject heading or something like that, and you want to look up the authorized access point, what do you do when you get to an authority file? Early on in this class we talked about a number of different control vocabularies and authority files where you might be wanting to look up information. I'm mostly going to be talking about the Library of Congress authorities in the rest of this class, so that's what I'm going to focus on in this video. But before I get to that, I just want to briefly mention that if you are a subscriber to OCLC's product called Connection, you have access to the Library of Congress authorities through the Connection interface, and when you choose to browse an authority file you can select, you see there on this drop down menu, a number of different choices if you want personal names or corporate names or topical subject headings, et cetera, et cetera. So if you have access to Connection, and this is a paid subscription so I know not everybody can afford it, but if you do then you have access to the Library of Congress authorities through Connection. However, these authorities are also available for free online. We talked about them a little bit earlier in this class. I'm going to do a little bit more depth right now. Authorities.loc.gov is the website for this authority file. And when you do a search, when you get to the homepage you'll see something that says search authorities and you click on that button and then you have a drop down menu where you can choose from a number of different types. And so those different types of information that need authority control that we talked about in the last video, you would choose the appropriate one from your drop down menu. If it's a personal name or a corporate name, choose name authority headings. If it's a preferred title name, choose title authority headings and those were serious titles as well. And if it's, I should say, a geographic name falls into the name authority headings also. But if it's a plain old topical subject heading then you choose subject authority headings. And no matter which of these you are using, I would highly recommend at least to begin with you browse them rather than search them. And that is the default option in the Library of Congress authorities. When you're in OCLC Connection you can choose browsing versus searching. In the authority's website, on the Library of Congress website it's much easier to browse. That's the default option. A browse instead of a search will get you an alphabetical list of headings that are close to whatever you browse for. And so sometimes if even if you aren't exactly spot on with what you're browsing for, you'll be able to kind of look up and down the list and find what it is that you are looking for. So I would highly recommend starting with browse and then if you're not putting it in that way then maybe do a keyword search to look for your access point that you want. One thing that you should know about browsing the Library of Congress authority website, if you find a authorized access point on your first try, you will see that the red button next to your search results will say authorized heading. So if you had browsed for Orwell, comma George, when you go to Orwell's heading, you would see that that red button tells you it's an authorized heading. And then you can click on that button to go to see the authority records just to verify. We'll talk more next week about how to read an authority record in the Markfields and everything. But if for some reason you were doing a browse for Eric Blair, which is George Orwell's real name, George Orwell was a pen name, you will see that these red buttons do not say authorized heading. So for example if you see this one with the button that says references, you'll know that you're not supposed to use this one. You should use something else instead. And then you click on that button to go see the authority record and figure out what it is that you're supposed to use instead. And again, we'll be talking more about how to interpret authority records next week. So for now, these are just the basics of how to navigate the Library of Congress authority website. And your assignment for this week will give you some chances to practice that.